LEGAL TECH NEWSLETTER
FEBRUARY 2015
Word 2013: Better by Design
Part Three of an Ongoing Series
By Jeffrey Roach
Welcome back. If you have read my previous two articles (in the
September and November 2014 issues), you are well on your way to
Word nirvana. If not, I recommend you take a moment to catch up on
those articles before you tackle this one. The good work we did to set
up the default look and feel of the Microsoft Word environment can
have a huge impact on the usability of the product. Another way that
we can improve the overall experience is to tweak the variety of
settings that lurk behind the scenes. That's right, it is time to talk
about Word Options.
There's a reason why I call my two-day strategic planning session for
Office 2013 "Black Holes & Revelations." Word is full of mysteries.
When you start to dig into them, if you are lucky, you may be
rewarded with that elusive a ha! moment: a revelation. But just as
often, the deeper you dig the more confused you become: a black
hole. I've seen many projects stall because the team couldn't come to
any agreement on what the default setting should be for Word
Options. In order to avoid that, let's establish some ground rules:
•
•
•
If you can leave the out-of-the-box setting intact without
compromising the usability of the product, do it.
Be respectful of how Word works in your current version.
Although we sometimes look at the latest upgrade as an
opportunity to fix mistakes made in the past, you have to be
very careful about compromising the expected behavior. Case in
point, if you begin typing a manual list, Word will convert it to an
automatic list. Some of us are tempted to disable this feature to
encourage our users to create their list using Styles. Changing
the expected behavior in order to support a best practice sounds
like a good idea, but this kind of thinking can backfire.
If you change a default setting, allow the users the flexibility to
change it back. Although we can hard code a setting through the
use of policies, in general you want to allow people to
•
personalize Word to work for them.
Don't let your personal preferences cloud your judgment. I
personally can't stand the mini toolbar and I'm always surprised
when people tell me that they find it useful.
Ready to get started? Click the File Tab and choose Options. Word's
options are organized into five tabs: General, Display, Proofing, Save,
Language and Advanced. I'm going to step through all five tabs,
pointing out the options that I think are worth discussing. If I don't
point it out, then you can safely leave the default setting.
The General Tab
Microsoft describes these as the general options for working with
Word. That's helpful. Most of these settings can be left as is, but there
are three that are worth discussing.
Office Theme. Office 2013 is visually very bland. I would recommend
setting the default theme to Dark Gray. People are still going to
complain that there's no contrast, but when you show them White,
they will thank you for selecting Dark Gray.
Open e-mail attachments and other uneditable files in reading
view. The idea here is to remind people that these files can't be edited
and saved, but our paper-loving audience is uncomfortable with
reading view and usually spend a few clicks to get back to print layout.
If the default behavior is always going to be to get out of reading view,
then you might consider turning this setting off.
Show the Start screen when this application starts. It's
important to verify that the Start screen (and it's recently edited
documents) doesn't interfere with any of your third-party tools,
including your document management system.
The Display Tab
These settings change how document content is displayed on the
screen and when printed. I'm okay with the default settings on this
tab. Some folks are tempted to turn on Update fields before printing,
but there are scenarios where we don't want the fields to update.
Turning this on takes the decision out of the individual user's hands. I
think you're better off teaching people how to update their fields and
discussing the scenarios where they might not want to.
The Proofing Tab
Make adjustments here to change how Word corrects and formats your
text. This tab is tricky because all of the really interesting options are
hidden behind the AutoCorrect Options button, which has five tabs.
Fortunately, the only settings we need to tweak are on the AutoFormat
As You Type tab. For those of you playing along at home, click the
AutoCorrect Options button and then select AutoFormat As You Type.
One example is replacing fractions (1/2) with fraction characters (½).
This one seems like a great idea, but there's a gotcha. While there are
symbols for common fractions, like ½, there is no symbol for less
common fractions like 1/8. The result is that you can end up with
some of your fractions that are symbols and some that are three
characters. This not only looks sloppy, but also impacts how the text
would be redlined. Note the differences between the first fraction and
the second: 15/8 versus ½ or ¼. You're better off using superscript
and subscript to create your fractions. In fact, you could build an
entire library of fractions using AutoText that would allow your users to
type the regular fraction (1/3) and get the super and subscripted
version (1/3).
Although I could make an argument that some of the other settings in
this tab should be changed — I'm looking at you Set left- and firstindent with tabs and backspaces — I've learned to make my peace
with these settings and leave them alone. The only other setting you
might consider changing on the Proofing tab is whether or not you
want to Mark grammar errors as you type. If you leave this setting on
you will end up with lots of squiggly green lines in your documents.
Legalese is rarely grammatically correct.
Before we leave this tab, I'd like to point out the Check/Recheck
Document button. It's curious that it is hidden away under Options,
instead of on the Review tab. If the button says Recheck it means that
you have run a spell-check on the document and ignored one or more
words. These words will continue to be ignored in this document until
the end of time, or you click the Recheck Document button. When I
receive a document from someone else I always use the Recheck
Document button to reset the document dictionary. Otherwise any
typos that have been accidently ignored will continue to be ignored.
It's not that I don't trust my fellow typist, but I don't trust my fellow
typist.
The Save Tab
Customize how documents are saved by changing these options. In
most law firms, we have third-party tools that play a role in how and
where our documents are saved. Because of these tools, I'm only
going to point out one setting that you might want to tweak: the Save
AutoRecover information every 10 minutes.
A good typist can type a lot of text in 10 minutes. I usually spin this
down to three or five minutes. On a modern machine these more
frequent AutoRecovers shouldn't cause degradation in performance.
The Language Tab
You can use the tab to Set the Office Language Preferences . The
particulars of your setup are unique, so there are no changes to make
on this tab. Here's a tip though: Did you know that Microsoft refers to
U.S. English as 1033? When you are browsing through the folder
structure, the 1033 folder contains the proofing tools for U.S. English.
The Advanced Tab
Microsoft calls these settings the Advanced options for working with
Word . I call them the "we didn't know where else to put them"
settings. There are lots of settings here that I'm tempted to change,
but once again I'm only going to focus on the most important options.
Prompt to Update Style. When you turn this setting on, anytime you
make a change to a style (other than the Normal style) and then click
the name of the style in the Styles pane, Word will prompt you to
update the Style to reflect the recent changes. Wait, what? Yes, it is
somewhat involved and can feel arbitrary. Here's a typical use case
scenario: Imagine that you have several paragraphs in your document
controlled by Heading 2. You select and format one of these Heading 2
paragraphs to include underlining. Do you get prompted to update the
style? No. However, if at any point you ever click in the Heading 2
paragraph with the underlining and then click the Heading 2 style on
the Styles pane, you will get the prompt. Frankly there are easier ways
to update styles and I think the delayed prompt is confusing. I would
leave it off.
Keep track of formatting. In earlier versions, this option was
directly tied to the Style Inspector. If it was turned on, direct
paragraph and character formats would appear in the respective plus
sections. If it was turned off, then you couldn't tell what direct formats
had been layered on top of your style. In Word 2013, the direct
formats show in the Style Inspector whether this option is turned off or
on. So, the only reason to turn this option on would be to mark the
formatting inconsistencies. No thanks, let's leave it off.
Enable click and type. Talk about nasty, when this option is turned
on you can click anywhere in the document and just start typing. Of
course Word is going to add lots of hard returns and tabs to get you
there. Let's pass.
Pasting from other programs: Keep Text Only. One of the
quickest ways to make a mess out of your document is to paste text in
from a browser or a PDF. Setting this to Keep Text Only will strip out
the format associated with incoming text, leaving you with plain text
that you can then restyle using Word. Yes, it can take a little more
time, but the end result is much more reliable.
Field Shading: Always. Fields automate some of the more repetitive
tasks in Word, like creating a table of contents or cross references. As
a result, it's important not to type over or delete field codes in your
document. Unfortunately, Word doesn't make it immediately obvious
where these magical codes live, unless you happen to click on the text
that contains the code. Changing this setting from When Selected to
Always will make all of the field codes in your document appear
shaded, whether they are selected or not.
Show this number of Recent Documents (25). As we have
discussed before, you will want to make sure that your document
management system works with this feature before you enable it.
Conclusion
Even when you narrow down the list, there are still lots of options to
consider. I hope this list will help guide your discussion. Don't be afraid
to disagree with me if you think a different setting will benefit your
users. Remember, you have the home court advantage.
Most of the settings in Word Options are stored in the registry and can
be set using the Office Customization Tool. Be warned, there are a few
that will require you to export a registry key and add it to your
configuration. Just think of this as Microsoft's way of keeping you on
your toys.
I hope you are enjoying our deep dive in Word 2013's configuration.
For my next article I'm going to take a look a the different ways you
can automate repetitive task, including galleries, building blocks,
content controls, VBA, action panes and custom task panes.
Jeffrey Roach, President of the legal technology training firm
Encoretech, has been working with law firms for the last 24 years
designing and delivering learning strategies. He can be reached at
[email protected].